At the SAPPHIRE NOW conference this week, SAP released the production version of the cloud-based Sales OnDemand software
that it unveiled earlier in the year. There has been a lot of the
esoteric commentary of SAP Sales OnDemand from those that exclusively
cover the IT industry. Unfortunately the majority of them have never
worked in sales or held a quota that prevents a provide a deeper
perspective on the relevance to the sales organization and what it can
provide to existing SAP customers or those evaluating it for the first
time. I covered some critical perspectives in my research agenda on sales as a background to my analysis of this new offering.

The Sales OnDemand offering is now available and brings together
what I call the five business technologies that can innovate sales
including: cloud computing, social media, business collaboration,
business analytics and business mobility. SAP has embraced these five
areas as part of their first release to help sales reps access the
application in the cloud through renting it in software as a service
(SaaS) method. Also SAP has integrated mobility and analytics in the
applications, along with blending collaboration and social media
methods to help sales work together in a team and organizational based
approach.

Looking at Sales OnDemand application in more detail it focused on
the sales rep and automating sales activities like found in
traditional SFA including that in SAP CRM. With a new interface design
and a social sales approach with capabilities like Facebook’s or
Twitter’s to monitor and engage in conversations, Sales OnDemand offers
a new approach to integrating social networking within an application –
in contrast to salesforce.com’s Chatter, which supports it externally.
Sales OnDemand provides the basic sales automation tasks – accounts,
contacts, leads, opportunities, products, activities, documents and
competitors ­– all easily accessed from any area in the application. It
also provides quick ways to adjust the application view of each area,
along with simple drill-down capabilities for more details for
reviewing and updating information. The new software makes it easy to
access sales information like accounts and contacts from within
Microsoft Outlook. Just as important are the integration of sales
information into the Outlook calendar and the ability to utilize it
within email.

SAP has integrated analytics into the sales application to provide
analysis on a range of areas from accounts, opportunities, pipeline and
needed perspective for sales rep, including the ability to quickly
examine the data in Microsoft Excel. For example, you can quickly
analyze sales activities in the pipeline to see how progress to quota
is going and then setup activities that need to be accomplished to
improve. Sales OnDemand has an advanced analysis capability to review
sales opportunities based on priorities. Our benchmark research on sales analytics
found that using analytics to improve the efficiency of sales processes
was businesses’ second-most important investment priority, behind
increasing revenue.

The application provides nice multitasking capabilities; for
instance, a salesperson can review a customer and competitors while
still maintaining focus on the sales pipeline. The interface is simple
and usable, which our sales research finds as number one priority by
sales organizations. However, sales reps who want to do what-if
role-playing with deals to see how they align to reaching quotas and
target commissions are left to the spreadsheet or must rent or purchase
separate applications for those tasks.

SAP also provides direct integration with ERP and SAP
BusinessByDesign to provide access to back-office information related
to customers, products, prices and even quotes. Information can shared
from within Sales OnDemand. This social-media-like collaboration lets a
salesperson access information and reference what SAP calls the Feed –
an area where users can broadcast to all relevant others or send direct
messages to individuals for specific needs. You can also follow people
and customers who are relevant to your role and responsibility. A
simple way to post and keep track of tasks in what SAP calls the Shelf
can improve both personal productivity and team selling.

SAP has moved quickly to provide Sales OnDemand on the Apple iPad
and iPhone and RIM BlackBerry. In addition to having all the normal
functions found in desktop software, users can leverage location
information from the iPad to map customers for analysis and activity
review. Providing a full set of capabilities on smartphones and tablets
is part of SAP’s overall strategy to expand further into mobile applications.
This level of mobile support and usability is a competitive edge for
SAP compared to its current SAP CRM and others in the SFA market.

Can SAP Sales OnDemand fend off cloud- and rental-based competitors I have assessed, particularly salesforce.com, Oracle CRM OnDemand[JB1]
and Oracle’s new Fusion for Sales? It depends on the competency and
maturity of the sales organization. The application is designed for
sales reps but does not have as robust workflow and lead-development
features as salesforce for example. It lacks Oracle Fusion’s focus on
managers’ needs, with forecasts, territories, compensation plans and
quotas. In addition, suppliers such as Merced, Varicent, Synygy and Xactly Systems have been expanding from the focus on management and operations of sales to help directly with sales managers and reps.

SAP should look beyond just the sales rep to the sales manager,
sales operations and to the management and executive team to determine
how to help the entire sales organization. Look at the peripheral tasks
that sales people spend so much time in using spreadsheets,
presentations and email to address to further address sales needs. I
will spend more time looking at Sales OnDemand as part of this year’s
vendor and product RFP assessment of sales applications for the entire
sales organization, including operations, management, managers and
reps. This sales application suite was not released in time for our 2011 Sales Performance Management Value Index
at the end of 2010, where our evaluation rated SAP CRM a Warm vendor
(the best is Hot) as it needed to improve usability and manageability
and was lacking other capabilities but was very good at adaptability.

At the SAPPHIRE NOW conference I got to hear from a couple of Sales
OnDemand customers, Phillips and PGi, though only IT representatives
were present who spoke about how they are moving to SAP Sales OnDemand
from spreadsheets, existing SAP CRM and a variety of salesforce and
NetSuite applications. Both users said the software is simple to
configure and set up and are working through integration with non-SAP
systems; it does not appear that SAP has spent enough time on
cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-enterprise application and data integration
that will be needed to scale its customer adoption but neither has the
other SFA providers. The scope of a migration to a new system should
not be underestimated, and could be improved with more dedicated tools
to automate the migration process and continuous synchronization tasks.

The existing SAP CRM is a heavy-duty system deployed on-premises (though it is evolving from my analysis).
But many organizations lack IT resources and time for a traditional
purchase, install, customize and deploy cycle like needed for SAP CRM.
The new SAP Sales OnDemand does not address all the needs of managers
and sales operations teams, but SAP is committed to advancing its
presence in sales and the cloud computing and on-demand area. This new
offering does address the top two SPM impediments we found in our sales performance management benchmark:
unifying scattered information and inconsistent execution. Now SAP must
get its first hundred customers and sales organizations using it and
persuade the market that it can grow the applications for everyone in
sales. If you want to see it for yourself, SAP has a free trial for you to explore.